Technical Field
The present invention relates to an apparatus for operating a robot by an operation terminal equipped with a touch panel, and in particular, to the apparatus which is used to operate various types of robots which are categorized as industrial robots.
Related Art
In an industrial robot system, it is usually possible to manually operate the robot (which is called as manual manipulation). This manual manipulation is used, for example, in performing teaching work (simply teaching) which teaches a robot movement trajectories. In this case, it is usual that an operator uses a pendant (an robot manipulating apparatus, that is, a teaching pendant) controllably connected to a controller which controls the robot. Hence, the operator can manually manipulate the robot. With this purpose, the pendant is provided with various operation keys dedicated to the manipulation, which are configured as mechanical switches, for example (for example, refer to PTL1).
In recent years, a pendant with a touch panel has been provided, with which the foregoing manual manipulation can be performed by manual operations on the touch panel (hereinafter, referred to as touch operations). A robot apparatus provided with such a pendant eliminates arrangement of the dedicated operation keys, which is thus expected to make the pendant smaller in size, make the display screen larger in size, make the device lower in production cost.